Search results for ""picador""

Jonathan Raban's Soft City is a compelling exploration of urban life: a classic in the literature of the city. First published in the 1970s, it is now more relevant to today’s overcrowded planet than ever.With an introduction by Iain Sinclair.In the city we can live deliberately: inventing and renewing ourselves, carving out journeys, creating private spaces. But in the city we are also afraid of being alone, clinging to the structures of daily life to ward off the chaos around us.How is it that the noisy, jostling, overwhelming metropolis leaves us at once so energized and so fragile? In Soft City, Jonathan Raban, one of our most acclaimed novelists and travel writers seeks to find out.'A psychological handbook for urban survival' – Sunday Telegraph

Read more less

A ruthless satire of academic life, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury is a witty campus novel and one of the most influential books of the 1970s.With an introduction by James Naughtie.Take a Valium. Have a party. Go on a demo. Shoot a soldier. Make a bang. Bed a friend. That’s your problem-solving system . . . But haven’t we tried all that?Howard Kirk, product of the Swinging Sixties, radical university lecturer, and one half of a very modern marriage, is throwing a party. The night will have all sorts of repercussions: for Henry Beamish, Howard’s desperate and easily neglected friend, and for Howard’s wife, promiscuous ’70s liberal and exhausted victim of motherhood.Funny, disconcerting and provocative, Bradbury's classic novel brilliantly satirizes a world of academic power struggles as his anti-hero seduces his away around campus. But is also reveals a marriage in crisis and demonstrates the fragility of the human heart.

Read more less

With an introduction by Evie WyldThe Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville is a funny and touching romance between two people who've given up on love. Set in the eccentric little backwater of Karakarook, New South Wales, pop. 1374, it tells the story of Douglas Cheeseman, a gawky engineer with jug-handle ears, and Harley Savage, a woman altogether too big and too abrupt for comfort. Harley is in Karakarook to foster 'Heritage', and Douglas is there to pull down the quaint old Bent Bridge. From day one, they're on a collision course. But out of this unpromising conjunction of opposites, something unexpected happens: sometimes even better than perfection.

Read more less

Kate Clanchy was born and grew up in Scotland but now lives in England. She is a popular poet: her collections, Slattern, Samarkand and Newborn have brought her many literary awards and an unusually wide audience. She has also written extensively for Radio 4 and reviews and writes comment for the Guardian.

Read more less

With an introduction by Sarah HallThe 1960s. Philip Dean, a footloose Yale dropout, is touring provincial France and sometimes Paris in a borrowed, once elegant car. He begins a mismatched affair with a young shop girl named Anne-Marie. Together they burn in an everyday but stunningly sensual paradise. A Sport and A Pastime is a seductive classic that established James Salter's reputation as one of the finest writers of our time. It is remarkable for its eroticism, its luminous prose and its ability to explore the boundaries between what is dreamt and what is lived, between body and soul.

Read more less

With an introduction by Jonathan LethemIt is 1913, and Viennese high society is determined to find an appropriate way of celebrating the seventieth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef. But as the aristocracy tries to salvage something illustrious out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ordinary Viennese world is beginning to show signs of more serious rebellion. Caught in the middle of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: youngish, rich, an ex-soldier, seducer and scientist.Unable to deceive himself that the jumble of attributes and values that his world has bestowed on him amounts to anything so innate as a 'character', he is effectively a man 'without qualities', a brilliant, detached observer of the spinning, racing society around him. Part satire, part visionary epic, part intellectual tour de force, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil is a work of immeasurable importance.

Read more less

Beautiful and brutal, two young cowboys come of age in The Border Trilogy – Cormac McCarthy's award-winning requiem for the American frontier.'A landmark in American literature' – GuardianWith an introduction from Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room.During the middle of the twentieth century, two teenage boys leave their childhoods behind across the US-Mexico border.John Grady Cole will search for his future to the south, a friend by his side, finding adventure and barbarism in the vanishing world of the Old West. Billy Parnham, after deciding not to kill her, will be drawn to the mountains of Mexico accompanied by a lone, pregnant wolf. When the two boys come together as men, in the trilogy's final volume, a dangerous chain of events will bring this story to its savage, inevitable conclusion.A stunning saga of loyalty and love, filled equally with sorrow and humour, The Border Trilogy is a powerful story of two friends growing up in a world where blood and violence are conditions of life.'In these three fierce, desolate, beautiful novels, McCarthy has created a masterpiece' – Sunday TimesThis edition collects all three novels in the Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain.Praise for Cormac McCarthy‘McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute’ – Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' – Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series'[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' – Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain

Read more less

With an introduction by Anne EnrightBefore the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.It is the 1920s, and Patrick Lewis has arrived in the bustling city of Toronto, leaving behind his Canadian wilderness home. Immersed in the lives of the people who surround him – the immigrants building the city, as well as those who dreamed it into being – Patrick begins to learn, from their stories, the history of the city itself. And he has his own adventures: searching for a missing millionaire, tunnelling beneath Lake Ontario, falling in love.In the Skin of a Lion is Michael Ondaatje's sparkling predecessor to his Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. Here we encounter Hana the orphaned girl and Caravaggio the thief for the first time, as well as a large cast of other characters, all lovingly and intimately portrayed. Exquisite and musical, In the Skin of a Lion is a novel that challenges the boundary between history and myth. It is a stunning modern classic.

Read more less

Finalist for the Story Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for FictionLong-listed for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature AwardNamed a Best Book of the Year by Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Esquire, NPR, and Kirkus ReviewsA new collection-about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life-by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose.A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she's lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In the stories of Wednesday's Child, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces-death, violence, estrangement-come to light. Even before such momen

Read more less

A hair-raising, head-banging, meet-the-Devil epic tale of love, youth, and rock 'n' roll. Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Less Is LostKip, Leslie, and Kira are outlierseven in the metal scene they love. In arch-conservative Gulf Coast Florida in the late 1980s, just listening to metal can get you arrested, but for the three of them the risk is well worth it, because metal is what leads them to one another.Different as they are, Kip, Leslie, and Kira form a family of sorts that proves far safer, and more loving, than the families they come from. Together, they make the pilgrimage from Florida''s swamp country to the fabled Sunset Strip in Hollywood. But in time, the delicate equilibrium they''ve found begins to crumble. Leslie moves home to live with his elderly parents; Kip struggles to find his footing in the sordid world of LA music journalism; and Kira, the most troubled of the three, finds herself drawn to ever darke

Read more less

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERA Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, Financial Times, Slate, The Chicago Public Library, Kirkus, The TelegraphA Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick[A] savagely satirical thriller. -PeopleThe Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries brings us Birnam Wood, a gripping thriller of high drama and kaleidoscopic insight into what drives us to survive.Birnam Wood is on the move . . . A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand's South Island, cutting o? the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice.

Read more less

The highly acclaimed graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster's classic City of Glass, featuring a new introduction by Art Spiegelman.Quinn writes mysteries. The Washington Post has described him as a post-existentialist private eye. An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print.Adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, with graphics by David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster's groundbreaking, Edgar Award-nominated masterwork, the first in the New York Trilogy, has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language.[This graphic novel] is, surprisingly, not just a worthy supplement to the novel, but a work of art that fully justifies its existence on its own terms.--The Guardian

Read more less

A complete collection of Robert Lowell's autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life.Robert Lowell's Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell's lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry. Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell's mental illness and his determined efforts to recover. It concludes with Lowell's reminiscences of other writers, among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell's expansive gifts as

Read more less

[Laura van den Berg is] a master of the short story form. Hers are deliciously unnerving, moving, and monstrous tales. Karen Russell, author of Orange World and other storiesA smart, fun, noir-y treasure map . . . Van den Berg somehow packs a duffel bag of plot into carry-on-size stories. She also has the right kind of range: from brutal to moving to funny, South America to Paris to Antarctica, really great to freaking outstanding. Kathryn Schulz, New YorkThe surreal, compulsively readable collection that established Laura van den Berg as a singular stylist, reissued for its tenth anniversary. The Isle of Youth, Laura van den Berg's breakout second story collection, explores the lives of women who are mired in secrecy and deception. Ranging from the inscrutability of a marriage, to private eyes working a baffling case in South Florida, to a teenager who assists her magician mother and steals from the audience, these s

Read more less

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactionsnot only in global affairs but in American society and Americans' lives.A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial hierarchy proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become well adjusted and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was necessary for her survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil

Read more less

Mislabeled boxes, problems with visiting nurses, confusing notes, an outing to the county fairsuch are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she attempts to organize her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit, and what appears to be candor she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction.

Read more less

The never-thought-we'd-see-it memoir from the legendary Sly Stone.Sly Stone created some of the most memorable anthems of the 1960s and 1970s (Everyday People, Family Affair). He electrified audiences at Woodstock and all over the world. His influence on modern music and culture is indisputable. But after a rapid rise to superstardom, Sly spent decades in the gripsof addiction.Having finally achieved a lasting sobriety, he is finally ready and able to relate the ups and downs and ins and outs of his amazing life. The book moves from Sly's early career as a radio DJ and record producer through the dizzying heights of the San Francisco music scene in the late 1960s and into the darker, denser life (and music) of 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles.Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) is a vivid, gripping, sometimes terrifying, and ultimately affirming tour through Sly's life and career. Like Sly, it's honest and playful, sharp and blunt, emotional

Read more less

As she builds her own life anew, an Italian writer embarks on an all-consuming search for the true story of the mysterious princess H. H. Amrit Kaur of Mandi.On a sweltering day in 2007, having just lost her brother to illness, Livia Manera Sambuy finds herself at a museum in Mumbai, enthralled by a 1924 photograph of a stunningly elegant Indian princess. What she reads in the picture's caption will change her life forever. This alluring Punjabi royal had supposedly sold her jewels in occupied wartime Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp, where she died within a year. Could it be true? And if so, how could such a sensational story have gone unreported? Almost against her will, Manera becomes drawn into the mystery of Amrit Kaur. Delving into the history of the British Raj, its durbars and society balls and jubilees, she shows us the precipitous decline of India's royal caste through the lives of extrao

Read more less

Winner of the National Book AwardWinner of the California Book AwardWinner of Tournament of BooksOut in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a bookSex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patternsand its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan's tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrato

Read more less

The World and All That It Holdsin all its hilarious, heartbreaking, erotic, philosophical gloryshowcases Aleksandar Hemon's celebrated talent at its pinnacle. It is a grand, tender, sweeping story that spans decades and continents. It cements Hemon as one of the boldest voices in fiction.As Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his estimable father. It's not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it's nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can't put in perspective.And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a ma

Read more less

The revelatory (The New York Review of Books) story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home. Jamaica Kincaid's first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate chauffeur who makes his living along the wide, open roads that pass the only towns he has ever seen. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air.As Mr. Potter's narrative unfolds in linked vignettes, his story becomes the story of a vital, damaged community. Amid his surroundings, he struggles to live at ease: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, and to shake off the encumbrance of his daughtersone of whom will return to Antigua after he dies and tell his story with equal measures of distance and sympathy.In Mr. Potter, Kincaid breathes life into a figure unlike any other in contemporary fiction, an individual consciousness emerging gloriously out of an unex

Read more less

Jamaica Kincaid's collected writings for The New Yorker's Talk of the Town record her first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New York.Talk Stories is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's original writing for The New Yorker's Talk of the Town, composed during the time when she first arrived in the United States from Antigua, from 1978 to 1983. Kincaid developed a unique voice, both in sync with William Shawn's tone for the quintessential elite magazine and (though unsigned) all her ownwonderingly alive to the ironies and screwball details that characterized her adopted city. The book also reflects Kincaid's development as a young writerthe newcomer who sensitively records her impressions here takes root to become one of our most respected authors.

Read more less

The final posthumous work by the coauthor of the major New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything.Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societiesvibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar for his doctoral thesis on the island's politics and history of slavery and magic. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber's final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research and the culmination of ideas that he developed in his classic, best

Read more less

Kincaid gathers a sparkling selection of new and beloved poetry and prose about each author's favorite flora. The passion for gardening and the passion for words come together in this inspired anthology, a collection of essays and poems on topics as diverse as beans and roses, by writers who garden and gardeners who write.Among the contributors are Daniel Hinkley on hellebores; Marina Warner, who remembers the Guinée rose; and Henri Cole, with the poems Bearded Irises and Peonies. Ian Frazier pulls weeds in Memories of a Press-Gang Gardener, and Michael Pollan defends a gothic cousin of the sunflower in Consider the Castor Bean; Ken Druse stalks the sexy jack-in-the-pulpit, and Elaine Scarry contemplates steep slopes of columbine. Most of the pieces are new, but Colette, Katharine S. White, William Carlos Williams, and several other old favorites also make appearances.Jamaica Kincaid, the much admired writer and a passionate gardener herself, has asse

Read more less

Finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Biography)One of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2023One of BookRiot''s Best Biographies of 2023Longlisted for the 2024 Women''s Prize in NonfictionThe boldly original, dramatic intertwined story of Catherine de' Medici, Elisabeth de Valois, and Mary, Queen of Scotsthree queens exercising power in a world dominated by men.Orphaned from infancy, Catherine de' Medici endured a tumultuous childhood. Married to the French king, she was widowed by forty, only to become the power behind the French throne during a period of intense civil strife. In 1546, Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, who would become Queen of Spain. Two years later, Catherine welcomed to her nursery the beguiling young Mary Queen of Scots, who would later become her daughter-in-law.Together, Catherine, Elisabeth, and Mary lived through the sea changes that tran

Read more less

A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle AwardWinner of the Women''s Prize for NonfictionNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER National Indie BestsellerA New York Times notable book of 2023 Vulture's #1 book of 2023One of Slate's ten best books of 2023 A Guardian best ideas book of 2023 One of Time's ten best books of 2023 Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book AwardI've been raving about Naomi Klein's Doppelganger . . . I can't think of another text that better captures the berserk period we're living through. Michelle Goldberg, The New York TimesIf I had to name a single book that makes sense of these last few dark years, it would be this one. Katie Roiphe, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another selfa double who was almost you and yet not yo

Read more less

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERNamed a Best Book of the Year by Time, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, Real Simple, and VogueA riveting account of women's lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.American women-American wives-have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era's mandate to be helpmeets to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to do good for the people of Vietnam.Sixty years later, Charlene's daughter, spurred by an encou

Read more less

WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTIONNAMED ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES' 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2023ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2023 A TOP TEN BOOK OF 2023 AT CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARYA new book by the Pulitzer Prizewinning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity.In Our Migrant Souls, the Pulitzer Prizewinning writer Héctor Tobar delivers a definitive and personal exploration of what it means to be Latino in the United States right now. Latino is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States, and also one of the most rapidly growing. Composed as a direct address to the young people who identify or have been classified as Latino, Our Migrant Souls is the first account of the historical and social forces that define Latino identity.Taking on the impacts of colonialism, public policy, immigration, media, an

Read more less

Now a Major Motion Picture Starring Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, Julie Walters, and Vanessa RedgraveThe Golden Age of Hollywood, a young British actor, a love affair, and a tragedy, Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool is Peter Turner's touching memoir of the last days of Hollywood icon Gloria Grahame, the Oscar-winner best known for her portrayal of irresistible femme fatales in films such as The Big Heat, Oklahoma and The Bad and the Beautiful.The Hollywood Reporter calls the film adaptation a tender, affecting romantic drama.On September 29, 1981, Peter Turner received a phone call that would change his life. His former lover, Hollywood actress Gloria Grahame, had collapsed in a Lancaster hotel and was refusing medical attention. He took her into his chaotic and often eccentric family's home in Liverpool to see her through her last days. Though their affair had ended years before, it was to him tha

Read more less

A serious, frequently brilliant novel with a sustained intensity that is rare in fiction. It's the most promising first novel that I've encountered this year. ?Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal[A] searching, emotionally resonant first novel . . . [Nobody Is Ever Missing] impressed me, and held me to my chair. There's significant talent at work here. ?Dwight Garner, The New York TimesThe 10th anniversary reissue of Catherine Lacey's beloved, star-making debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing: a mordant, uncanny, and unputdownable journey into one woman's attempt to break free of her life.Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields,

Read more less

The only Lou Reed bio you need to read. -The Washington PostA Rolling Stone best music book of 2023 One of Pitchfork's ten best music books of 2023 A Variety best music book of the year A Kirkus Reviews best nonfiction book of 2023There have been many biographies of Lou Reed, but Will Hermes has written the definitive life . . . He has brought to the assignment a sharp eye, a clear head, a lucid prose style, and a determination to let Lou be Lou, without judgment. -Lucy Sante, author of Low LifeThe most complete and penetrating biography of the rock master, whose stature grows every year.Since his death in 2013, Lou Reed's living presence has only grown. The great rock poet presided over the marriage of Brill Building pop and the European avant-garde, and left American culture transfigured. In Lou Reed: The King of New York, Will Hermes offers the definitive narrative of R

Read more less

National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 HonoreeLong-listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature AwardNamed a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Vulture, and BBCAn enthralling and original first novel about exile, diaspora, and the impossibility of Black refuge in America and beyond.In the morning, I received a phone call and was told to board a flight. The arrangements had been made on my behalf. I packed no clothes, because my clothes had been packed for me. A car arrived to pick me up.A man returns home to sub-Saharan Africa after twenty-six years in America. When he arrives, he finds that he doesn't recognize the country or anyone in it. Thankfully, someone recognizes him, a man who calls him brother-setting him on a quest to find his real brother, who is dying.In Hangman, Maya Binyam tells the story of that search, and of the phant

Read more less

Winner of the 2023 National Book Critics Circle for Nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeA Washington Post best nonfiction book of 2023 Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in NonfictionA riveting indictment of the child welfare system . . . [A] bracing gut punch of a book. Robert Kolker, The Washington Post[A] moving and superbly reported book. Jessica Winter, The New YorkerA harrowing account . . . [and] a powerful critique of [the] foster care system . . . We Were Once a Family is a wrenching book. Jennifer Szalai, The New York TimesA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice One of Publishers Weekly''s best nonfiction books of 2023 The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six childrenand a searing indictment of the American foster care system.On March 26, 2018, rescue worker

Read more less

An excellent book by a genius. -Kurt VonnegutA generation-defining portrait of the 1960s by the master of New Journalism.Tom Wolfe raised the banner for his high-octane brand of New Journalism with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, his first book of essays, which collects stories from corners of 1960s America that few had described before. With a thrilling flair for detail, Wolfe creates an indelible portrait of the era-from the burgeoning ersatz glamor of Las Vegas, to the hot-rodding world of car customizers, to a close-up look at the working lives of New York City doormen.These essays are a testament to Wolfe's unparalleled ability to capture the zeitgeist on the page, bringing it to life with colorful and unusual characters and an inimitable ear for a new kind of American idiom. The force and depth of his writing endures decades after his debut, reaffirming, yet again, his role as a foundational figure i

Read more less

It's hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño . . . [Antwerp is] exceptional and moving. Nicole Krauss, The Guardian Oft called the big bang of Roberto Bolaño's universe, Antwerp is his first novelor the shattered remnants of one. Written when he was just twenty-seven years of age, it was so intensely strange and solitary that he tucked it away for more than twenty years, certain that any publisher would slam the door in his face. It proceeds in hallucinatory sketches: a lonely highway, a desolate campground, a freshly abandoned hotel room; a tryst, an interrogation, a murder; and somewhere just out of reach, a young, feverish writer named Roberto Bolaño drifting in and out of view. A radical, sui generis effort by a burgeoning genius, Antwerp is an essential part of Bolaño's oeuvre.

Read more less

The dramatic story of W. E. B. Du Bois''s reckoning with the betrayal of Black soldiers during World War Iand a new understanding of one of the great twentieth-century writers.When W. E. B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to close ranks and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, would never be finished. In The Wounded World, Chad L. Williams tells the dramatic story of Du Bois's failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. The surprising account of this unpublished book lends new insight into Du Bois's struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of

Read more less

Extraordinary . . . [Bolaño's] greatest work. James Wood, The New York Times The book that catapulted Roberto Bolaño into international literary stardom, By Night in Chile is the final testimony of Sebastián Urrutia LacroixChilean priest and member of Opus Dei, eminent literary critic and failed poetas he is haunted by a shadowy figure from his past. In Urrutia's feverish last hours, a deluge of memories pours from him: of hobnobbing with Santiago's most unctuous literati; of undertaking a mission to save Europe's decaying cathedrals from existential threat by pigeon excrement; of retreating into Greco-Roman poetry during the darkest chapter of modern Chilean history; of tutoring Augusto Pinochet in Marxist theory, so that the General may better understand his enemies. Throughout he insists, with fracturing conviction, that he was always on the right side of history. A novel about high art and fascism, silence and complicity, and, ultimatel

Read more less

SPECIAL TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITIONThe New York Times bestselling third installment of Jeff VanderMeer's wildly popular Southern Reach Trilogy.It is winter in Area X, the mysterious wilderness that has defied explanation for thirty years, rebuffing expedition after expedition, refusing to reveal its secrets. As Area X expands, the agency tasked with investigating and overseeing itthe Southern Reachhas collapsed in on itself in confusion. Now one last, desperate team crosses the border, determined to reach a remote island that may hold the answers they've been seeking. If they fail, the outer world is in peril.Meanwhile, Acceptance tunnels ever deeper into the circumstances surrounding the creation of Area Xwhat initiated this unnatural upheaval? Among the many who have tried, who has gotten close to understanding Area Xand who may have been corrupted by it? In this last installment of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach

Read more less

SPECIAL TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITIONIn Authority, the New York Times bestselling second volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, Area X's most disturbing questions are answered . . . but the answers are far from reassuring.After thirty years, the only human engagement with Area Xa seemingly malevolent landscape surrounded by an invisible border and mysteriously wiped clean of all signs of civilizationhas been a series of expeditions overseen by a government agency so secret it has almost been forgotten: the Southern Reach. Following the tumultuous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the agency is in complete disarray.John Rodriguez (aka Control) is the Southern Reach's newly appointed head. Working with a distrustful but desperate team, a series of frustrating interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, Control begins to penetrate the secrets of Area X. But wit

Read more less

Urgent, haunting, and fearless. Megan Abbott, author of Beware the WomanA Barnes & Noble Mystery & Thriller Pick An Elle Best Book of the Summer An Apple Best Book of May A Most Anticipated Book from BookPage, SPY, Lit Hub, and Paste MagazineCormac McCarthy meets Killing Eve in this gritty, razor-sharp thriller following two indelible women on a path to certain destruction Florence Florida Baum is not the hapless innocent she claims to be when she arrives at the Arizona women's prisonor so her ex-cellmate Diosmary Sandoval keeps insinuating.Dios knows the truth about Florida's crimes, understands what Florence hides even from herself: that she was never a victim of circumstance, an unlucky bystander misled by a bad man. Dios knows that darkness lives in women too, despite the world's refusal to see it. And she is determined to open Florida's eyes and unleash her true self.

Read more less

The essential, urgent coming-of-age novel by Jamaica Kincaid, a reinventor of the form.Since her first, prizewinning collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River, Jamaica Kincaid's work has been met with nothing short of amazement. The New York Times hailed her prophetic power and the Los Angeles Times Book Review said, No one else seems to be writing quite this way.With Annie John, the story of a young girl coming of age in Antigua, Kincaid tore open the theme that lies at the heart of her fierce, incantatory novels: the ambivalent and essential bonds created by a mother's love. In this book, written in Kincaid's lucid, elemental style, Annie John's ambivalence is universally familiar and wrenchingly real.

Read more less